Dave Weigel and Andrew Sullivan Broke This Really Fun Twitter Tool

The folks over at Northwestern's Knight Lab have a handy tool to occupy you until polls close tomorrow night: an app that predicts who your favorite people on Twitter are voting for. There is one caveat however: the machine can't figure out the Andrew Sullivans or Dave Weigels of this world.

Specifically the technology tracks words, @-mentions, hashtags and links in the Twitter feeds of known political supporters and compares those to the same elements in the feeds of other potential voters. The greater the similarity between the two, the more likely they are to support the same candidate, O’Banion said.

80 percent is pretty good (Nate Silver would agree!), but apparently Dave Weigel and Andrew Sullivan are no match for Tweetcast. Here's what happened when we put Weigel in, we got this:

Danger Will Robinson. Danger. But you know, who knows, maybe the app is actually telling us the truth and Weigel/Sullivan will rip off their masks tomorrow and tell us they voted Romney/Ryan?

And what about debate moderator Martha Raddatz, who conservatives thought was an Obama plant?

And Salon's politico/ thorn in Donald Trump's side, Alex Pareene:

And number wizard Nate Silver:

Based on our initial observations, using the f-word, and words like "brown," "gay," and "equality" make the app think you will be voting blue. And @mentioning people like Lady Gaga, Rupaul, Lena Dunham, and Gabrielle Douglas make it think you will vote Obama too. Getting into twitter fights with Donald Trump, and mentioning Drudge Report will make the app think red. We also found that covering the campaign trail has an effect on your outcome:

David Wagner (@david_r_wagner): Romney/Ryan because he uses the word "killed."

That all said, it's important to remember that these are predictions. And who knows what people will do in the voting booth? And while you spend some time thinking about that, just plug a few more names in.

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